The spring equinox has just passed (for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere). In the Persian calendar, Nowruz was just celebrated. Palm Sunday leading into Easter in the Christian world and Passover in Judaism... This is a time of renewal, a time to shake off the death and darkness of winter and embrace the new light and life offered to us by the world.

So I thought a meditation on the universal flow of life by the great Medieval mystic, Hildegard von Bingen would set the right tone for us today.

This song of praise is more than just a beautiful catalog of how God, in the motherly aspect of the Holy Spirit, is so important to creation. Read it deeply and you will see that a powerful and very specific vision is being communicated.

God, through the Holy Spirit, is "life within life / of all that has being." This is an image of the formless, vivifying force of the divine, the Holy Breath that permeates all of manifest existence, everything in nature, every form, giving it life, making it holy, making it divine.

Through this divine animating spirit shared by all, all separate things are actually one: "you bind and gather / all people together."

Another translation renders these lines as:From you clouds flow, air flies,rocks have their humours,rivers spring forth from the watersand earth sweats her green vigour.

All of physical reality, even in its most solid forms of earth and rock, all of 'solid' reality... flows. Nothing is as tangible or stationary as it may superficially appear. All forms possess a sort of divine inner 'sap' -- the fluid Holy Spirit -- that is its true being or essence which shows itself as life: "and earth sweats her green vigour."

This is not a dusty theological statement, but a vision of life, how the Divine flows unhindered through all of creation, and it is that flowing that is life. And all things, all people, you and I, we are not solid, separate physical bodies; we, too, are nothing less than that eternal flow.